DO YOU KNOW THE HISTORY OF THE MARSHALL GROUP?
DID YOU KNOW ITS FOUNDERS WERE ALL PHYSICISTS WHO WORKED ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT, THE ATOMIC BOMB, THAT IT WAS INVOLVED IN HELPING THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY WIN ITS CASE IN COURT. THAT ALL WHO HAVE BEEN A PART OF THAT INSTITUTE ARE IN SOME WAY CONNECTED TO THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY?
DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT LIES BEHIND THE DENIERS OF GLOBAL WARMING IS VERY RICH MEN LIKE GEORGE SOROS TELLING AMERICANS THAT ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN IS A COMMUNISTIC OR FASCIST IDEA?
YOU REALLY OUGHT TO KNOW WHO'S "SPEAKING OUT ON ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS"!
THIS GROUP FOOLED YOU SEVERAL TIMES BEFORE!
WITH CITIES ON BOTH COASTS GOING UNDERWATER, WITH NEW YORK CITY PREPARING FOR THE RISE IN SEA LEVELS, HOW COULD THEY NOT AGREE, RIGHT?
BUT THE MARSHALL GROUP STILL DOESN'T WANT US TO BLAME HUMAN BEINGS, OR INDUSTRY, OR EMISSIONS, OR ANYTHING THAT SUGGESTS WE HUMANS CAN STOP IT.
THE MARSHALL GROUP NOW ADMITS THERE IS GLOBAL WARMING, BUT THEY ARE STILL THE "MERCHANTS OF DOUBT" WHO SPEND FORTUNES TELLING US NOT TO BLAME ANY OF IT ON HUMANS, NO, NOT IN ANY WAY!
I FIND THAT THE NEW DEFINITION OF BOTH INSANE AND STUPID.
TAKE A COOL, PERHAPS AIR-CONDITIONED STORE ROOM, EMPTY, AND STUFF EVEN 6 OR 8 PEOPLE INTO IT. CLOSE THE DOOR, DO NOT ADJUST THE AIR-CONDITIONING.
SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN AN HOUR, 4 HOURS...A DAY.
IN ALMOST NO TIME, SOME WILL BE HAMMERING ON THE DOOR TO GET OUT, COOL OFF, GET A FRESH BREATH OF AIR.
REMEMBER A TREE-SHADED PLAY AREA ROM YOUR CHILDHOOD.
NICE, COOL, A GOOD PLACE TO SPEND HOURS.
REMOVE THE TREE, SCRAPE OFF THE GRASS, LAY DOWN SOME ASPHALT.
HOW LONG, ON A SUMMER DAY, WOULD YOU ALLOW A CHILD TO PLAY ON THAT?
WHERE THAT SHADE TREE STOOD, WHERE WE WERE COMFORTABLE SITTING OR PLAYING FOR HOURS BECOMES A HOT, UNBEARABLE PLACE WHERE ONE TRULY CAN "FRY EGGS ON THE SIDEWALK".
IMAGINE A RURAL SETTING...ONE HOUSE EVERY MILE OR EVEN HALF-MILE OR SO.
TREE-LINED RURAL DIRT ROAD. LITTLE TRAFFIC.
ADD HOUSES UNTIL THERE IS LESS THAN 12 FEET BETWEEN THEM.
ADD HUNDREDS OF CARS, OUTDOOR HEATING/COOLING UNITS, CONCRETE DRTIVEWAYS, ETC.
SEE ANY DIFFERENCE?
COMMON SENSE....IT'S JUST COMMON SENSE.
ADD HUMANS AND THE THINGS HUMANS USE AND YOU DO CHANGE THE ENTIRE ENVIRONMENT.
WE'VE REMOVED THE "LIFE-GIVERS" IN FAVOR OF LIFE-TAKERS.
WE'VE SCRAPED AWAY AND BUILT UPON UNTIL WE ARE ALMOST MAXED-OUT.
SO WHY DO THOSE LIKE THE MARSHALL GROUP KEEP DENYING THAT HUMAN ACTIVITY HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE, GLOBAL WARMING?
IF YOU REALLY CARE, READ ON.
One of the most important persistent and consistent voices going back to the late 1980s, challenging the scientific evidence, is the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
For decades, they have either denied the reality of global warming or insisted that, if there is warming, it is NOT caused by human activities or, as they say today, they insist that the "scientific uncertainties" are too great to warrant government regulation.
THERE IT IS!
THEY DON'T WANT GOVERNMENTAL REGULATION OF THE "MONEYMAKERS", THE MEGA-CORPORATIONS WHO MUST BE ABLE TO DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT AND CREATE GLOBAL WARMING SO THE ECONOMY CAN FLOURISH.
IT'S ABOUT BILLIONS, TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN PROFITS.
THEY SIMPLY DON'T WANT TO SPEND MEGA-BUCKS TO MAKE A SMALLER ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT.
THEY JUST DO NOT WANT THE EXPENSE.
IF MILLIONS DIE, MILLIONS MORE WILL TAKE THEIR PLACE, SO WHY WORRY ABOUT THE EFFECTS ON HUMAN BEINGS?
WE'VE SEEN IN MANY DOCUMENTS BEFORE HOW THE GIANTS OF INDUSTRY HAVE NOT CARED ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION.
THEY ARE CONCERNED ONLY WITH PROFITS, PROFITS, $$$$$.
THEY DON'T WANT THAT REGULATED!
Today the Marshall Institute no longer denies the reality of man-made climate change, but they continue to cast doubt on climate science.
For example, in March, 2011, they had on their website, 'Many of the temperature data and computer models used to predict climate change are uncertain, as are our understandings of important interactions in the natural climate.
Reducing these many uncertainties requires a significant shift in the way climate change research is carried out.'
TRANSLATION?
"YES, WE SEE THAT A MILE OF CONCRETE IS HOTTER THAN A MILE OF GRASSLAND, BUT SCREW THAT! IT'S "UNCERTAIN" HOW MUCH HOTTER!"
THEY HAVE SHIFTED TACTICS, NOW THAT ALL CAN SEE THE GLARING FACTS OF GLOBAL WARMING AND SEA LEVEL RISE, THE MELTING GLACIERS AND ARCTIC/ANTARCTIC , THE CHANGED MIGRATION PATTERNS OF MAMMALS AND BIRDS, THE DRIFTING OF BOTH PLANTS AND ANIMALS EVER NORTHWARD TO ESCAPE A WARMER SOUTH...
THEY HAD TO SWITCH TO SOMETHING NEW...SO NOW IT'S "BAD SCIENCE", THEY CLAIM.
SCIENCE IS FINE WHEN THEY WANT MAN TO HAVE MONKEYS AND POND SCUM FOR ANCESTORS, BUT SCIENCE FAILS WHEN IT PRESENTS INCONVENIENT TRUTHS?
IT'S "UNCERTAINTIES IN DATA" WHEN IT MEANS SPENDING PROFITS TO SAFEGUARD HUMAN AND GLOBAL LIFE.
A poll done by the Yale Project on Climate Change working together with the Gallup polling organization showed that in 2007, 72% of Americans were completely or mostly convinced that global warming was underway.
62% of American citizens AT THAT TIME believed that life on earth could continue without major disruptions ONLY IF society took immediate and drastic action to reduce global warming.
Frank Luntz, a Republic Party strategist, AGREED, and said so in 2006, "I think most people would conclude that there is global warming taking place, and that the behavior of humans are affecting the climate..."
BUT...HE ALSO ISSUED A "STRATEGY MEMO" TO HIS COHORTS WHO WERE RUNNING FOR OFFICE THAT YEAR ...
READ ON...
Luntz advised Republican candidates not to use the phrase 'global warming', but to call it climate change instead. The reason, he explained, was because climate change is a lot less frightening than 'global warming'.
He argued that Republican candidates running for office should use scientific uncertainty as a political strategy, that they should emphasize the scientific uncertainty around the issues and insist that there was no scientific consensus.
So he wrote, 'The scientific debate remains open, voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."
YES, AMERICAN VOTERS, HE DID WRITE THAT AND IT WAS "LEAKED"! HE WAS BUSTED...BUT FEW GAVE A DAMN.
HE TURNED "UNCERTAINTY" INTO A TOOL TO MAKE THE MASSES DOUBT, MERELY SO THE MASSES DID NOT DEMAND A CHANGE IN THE WAY AMERICAN BUSINESSES AND OUR VERY AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE (2 CARS IN EVERY GARAGE, URBAN SPRAWL, COAL-BURNING POWER PLANTS, ETC) WERE ENDANGERING US AND ANIMALS AND THE ENTIRE ENVIRONMENT... BECAUSE MONEY WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN HUMAN OR ANY OTHER LIFE!
WHAT MOST AMERICANS DO NOT KNOW IS THIS:
"In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had written unequivocally, 'Human activities are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents that absorb or scatter radiant energy. Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.' So the IPCC said that in 2001.
But in fact the science had actually coalesced earlier than that.
In the second assessment report of the IPCC published in 1995, the scientists had written, "'The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on global climate.' "
BUT WAIT, LET US ASK...
Did those summaries in the IPCC and in the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society and many other scientific societies who had attempted to summarize the scientific work, were those summaries consistent with what was published in the rank and file, peer reviewed scientific journals?
YES! VERY MUCH SO, YES!
Through a random sample of 1,000 articles in the ISI, Institute for Scientific Information database, it was found that in fact NONE of the articles dissented from that IPCC position....NOT ONE!
In fact, there was essentially unanimity in the scientific community at that time that the balance of evidence DID suggest a discernible impact, and that most of the observed warming was likely to have been due to greenhouse gas emissions.
Professor Naomi Oreskes published this finding in Science Magazine in 2004.
In 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told the citizens of California,"I say the debate is over, we know the science, we see the threat and we know the time for action is now."
He announced an initiative in California to commit the state of California to Kyoto level controls on greenhouse gas emissions.
BUT BEFORE THIS, A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT, GEORGE H.W. BUSH HAD AGREED WITH THE CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS!
YES, HE DID!
In 1992, 193 nations, including the United States and Australia, signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and when President George H. W. Bush signed the Framework Convention he called on world leaders to translate the written document into 'concrete action to protect the planet'.
SO WHAT HAPPENED?
WHY DID THE INITIATIVE TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING CHANGE?
What happened to this political consensus, this scientific consensus, that global warming was discernible, was a REALITY?
What happened to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change?
THE HISTORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE GOES BACK OVER 100 YEARS!
John Tyndall was the man who first established the concept of a greenhouse gas.
Through a series of experiments in the 1850s, Tyndall showed that certain gases, particularly carbon dioxide and water vapor, had a very distinctive property of being highly transparent to visible light, but rather opaque to infrared.
Water vapor and carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, he showed, allowed light to come in from the sun, but had a tendency to TRAP HEAT.
Tyndall understood this is a very important fact about the earth, because without this natural greenhouse effect, the earth would be as cold as the moon or Mars and be a completely inhospitable place for life. The natural greenhouse gas was basically a "good" thing.
The first person to suggest that changes in the greenhouse gas concentration could change the climate even more so, but who lived in a cold climate and saw warming as a better thing, was Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish geochemist.
Arrhenius was the first to suggest that by burning fossil fuels, mostly coal, we were adding additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere above and beyond the natural CO 2 levels, and that this could change the climate through an increase in the absorption and trapping of heat in the atmosphere, so that doubling CO 2 would lead to an average global temperature increase of 1.5º to 4.5º centigrade.
HIS FORMULA IS STILL USED TODAY!
THE MAN HELPED ESTABLISH THE NOBEL INSTITUTE AND NOBEL PRIZE. HE WAS NOT SOME "NUTCASE".
The first person to suggest that GLOBAL WARMING might be a bad thing was Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer.
In 1938, Callendar was the first to suggest that global warming was probably already underway.
He compiled some of the early measurements of CO 2 in the atmosphere from, mostly, Europe, and in a publication in the quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society suggested that temperature might in fact already be beginning to increase.
That was in 1938.
1938!
In 1939 war broke out in Europe, Callendar became involved in war work, as did many other scientists. The issue was not really revisited in a serious way until the 1950s, when it was taken up by a number of scientists in Europe, the United States and Australia, and most particularly by two men, Hans Seuss and Roger Revelle, both professors at the University of California, San Diego.
In 1957, Suess and Revelle published an article in the peer reviewed journal, Tellus, in which they suggested that mankind was performing a great, perhaps too risky geophysical experiment -- taking carbon dioxide that had been stored in rocks over the course of hundreds of millions of years of geological history, and returning a very significant amount of that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere over the course of only a few decades (burning coal).
This argument was also made by a number of people including Bert Bolin in Sweden, who later would work on acid rain and also founded the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Through the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58, he obtained funding for the beginning of this project to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This became Dave Keeling's life work.
He continued it until he died just a few years ago.
For his untiring work, he won the National Medal of Science in the United States, awarded to him by President George W. Bush, and he produced what is now known as the Keeling Curve, which today is probably the single most reproduced time series data in the history of science.
By 1965 Keeling had already concluded that there was in fact a detectable increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
[THIS, ALSO, IS SIMPLY COMMON SENSE! ADD MILLIONS OF HUMANS AND ANIMALS TO FEED THEM EACH YEAR, ADD BUILDINGS TO HOUSE THEM, VEHICLES TO TRANSPORT ALL, FACTORIES TO PRODUCE THE GOODS HUMANS NEED, ADD EXTRACTING NATURAL RESOURCES TO ACCOMMODATE THEIR PRESENCE. TAKE AWAY THE VERY THINGS THAT PRODUCE OXYGEN AND TAKE IN CARBON DIOXIDE. REMOVE TREES, GRASSES, VEGETATION... DO THE MATH, THE SIMPLE MATH...WHAT DO YOU GET?]
This result discovered by these scientists who were in agreement, WERE, led to the U.S. President Science Advisory Committee writing a report with an appendix written by Revelle and Keeling, in which they made one of the early specific predictions of what the impact of increasing carbon dioxide might be. In 1965, they wrote, 'By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO 2 in our atmosphere than at present, and this will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate could occur.'
NO DOUBT ABOUT IT IN 1965!
Keeling and Revelle's report eventually landed on the desk of President Lyndon Johnson, and in 1965, in a special message to congress, Lyndon Jonson declared, 'This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.'
There was soon an emerging consensus in the expert community that, given the rise of CO 2 that Keeling had documented, sooner or later warming would be expected to occur AND CONTINUOUSLY RISE.
This consensus was expressed by numerous scientific bodies in many parts of the world.
One of the most concise summaries came from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1979, who wrote, 'a plethora of studies from diverse sources indicate a consensus that climate changes will result from man's combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use'.
NOTE THE WORDS "WILL RESULT".
So if anyone says nobody knew, OR that nobody COULD HAVE known, we surely can point to all the above and say that that's not true.
YES, WE DID KNOW!
PRESIDENTS KNEW, GOVERNORS KNEW, SCIENTISTS KNEW AND THEY ALL TOLD US WHAT THEY KNEW.
PLANS WERE MADE TO CORRECT THE SITUATION, TO STOP THIS IN ITS TRACKS.
AND THEN...
A RIFT, A DIVISION, ALL BASED ON HOW LONG UNTIL OUR EMISSIONS SPELLED BIG DISASTER.
Most scientists writing in the 1970s thought that 'will result' meant perhaps by the year 2000 or even later. Figures like 2030, 2040, 2050 sometimes got bandied about.
One scientist who briefed the Carter administration on this issue in 1979 remembers being asked by an official in the White House, 'so when is all of this going to happen?'
And one of the scientists said, 'well maybe in 40 years.'
The White House official said, 'get back to me in 39!'
One of these was John Perry, who was chief staff officer for the Climate Research Board at the US National Academy of Sciences.
In 1981 he pointed out a very interesting idea.
He wrote, 'Physically, a doubling of CO 2 is no magic threshold.
If we have good reason to believe that a 100% increase in carbon dioxide will produce significant impacts on climate, then we must have equally good reason to suspect that even the small increase we have already produced may have suddenly altered our climate.'
This is a really important point, because we always talk about DOUBLING CO 2, and maybe that sometimes leads people to think it's almost as if nothing will happen until we get to the DOUBLING.
Of course we know that things are ALREADY happening, RIGHT NOW.
So Perry concluded, "Thus climate change is not a matter for the next century, we are most probably doing it right now."
That was in 1981.
WERE WE REALLY CREATING GLOBAL WARMING BY A "MERE" MAYBE 30% INCREASE IN GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS?
IN 1981?
THE DATA SAID YES.
In 1982 Roger Revelle again addressed the question in an article in Scientific American, and he wrote 'Models of the world's climate indicate that the answer is probably yes, but an unambiguous climate signal has not yet been detected.'
Six years later, NASA climate modeller, James Hansen and his team, concluded that the signal HAD been detected.
In work published in the Journal of Geophysical Research and also the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in testimony to the US Congress, James Hansen declared that he was 99% certain that climate change was indeed underway.
AT THE SAME TIME as the scientific understanding was beginning to coalesce, we see a politically motivated campaign created to cast doubt on it.
THE PARANOIA OF BIG INDUSTRY WENT OFF THE CHARTS!
GOVERNMENT REGULATING BIG BUSINESS, FORCING COSTLY CHANGES TO "BUSINESS AS USUAL", MAKING LAWS TO CLEAN UP OUR AIR, WATER, SOIL CAUSED THE BIGGEST POLLUTERS TO RISE LIKE A HUNGRY LION FROM SLEEP.
THE WALL STREET GIANTS WERE NERVOUS, AND THOSE THEY FUNDED AT ELECTION TIME WERE GETTING THEIR INSTRUCTIONS...
"STOP THIS RIGHT NOW, OR ELSE NO BIG CONTRIBUTIONS FOR YOU!"
MONEY TALKS!
THOSE WITH HONOR FOR SALE LISTEN.
GLOBAL WARMING HAD TO BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE SOME EVIL PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN VOTERS!
CAMPAIGN AGAINST TRUTH
The campaign focused on the claim that the science was unsettled and therefore it would be premature for governments to act to do anything about it. It turns out that the origins of this claim can actually be traced back to a relatively small handful of people.
And that's how we got that beacon of denial, that fortress of naysayers, the George C. Marshall Institute, ensconced in Washington DC to be near Congress, which is its willing slave...for the right amount of $$$$, for sizeable dumps into the old "war chests"
THE ELITE TOP FEW PERCENT OF THOSE WHO CONTROL AMERICA DON'T WANT YOU TO DEMAND A BETTER, CLEANER, HEALTHIER WORLD.
THEIR ANCESTORS "INVENTED" POLLUTION, AND IT'S CHEAPER TO KEEP IT!
CLEANUP NOW WOULD COST A FORTUNE, AND THEY WANT TO KEEP THEIR FORTUNES, THANKS!
WHAT HAPPENS TO US "PEONS" IS OF NO CONCERN TO THEM....THERE ARE PLENTY MORE WHERE WE CAME FROM.
AND, BECAUSE MOST HAVE BEEN DUMBED-DOWN ENOUGH TO ACCEPT WHAT THE "GREAT GODS OF INDUSTRY", OUR BLESSED "JOB-GIVERS" TELL US, WHAT OUR POLITICAL PARTY CHIEFS TELL US TO THINK AND BELIEVE, NO QUESTIONING THEIR TAKE ON THINGS, WELL, AMERICANS SIMPLY CHOSE TO LIVE LIKE ANIMALS IN A FEED LOT, IN EVER-GROWING TOXIC FILTH AND ....AND LIKE IT!
SURE THERE ARE DAYS WE HAVE AIR QUALITY WARNINGS AND SEE PEOPLE DROP DEAD FROM "JUST" THE AIR THEY TRIED TO BREATHE, BUT IT'S "TOO LATE" TO CHANGE THAT, RIGHT?
SURE OUR KIDS HAVE MORE ASTHMA, MORE ALLERGIES, AND OUR ELDERLY HAVE A HARD TIME BREATHING IN GREATER NUMBERS.
BUT THAT'S ALL "COINCIDENCE", RIGHT?
RIGHT?
AND THE ICE IS MELTING AND THE SEAS ARE RISING AND WE HAVE NEW RECORDS SET EACH YEAR ON HOTTEST SUMMER ON RECORD, ON LONGEST DROUGHT IN HISTORY, ON SKIN DAMAGE/SKIN CANCERS, ON "MYSTERY ILLNESSES" THAT TAKE OUT A FEW HERE AND THERE...ALL COINCIDENCES, ALL OF THEM, RIGHT?
RIGHT?
NO WORRIES!
WE'RE FINE.
EARTH IS FINE.
AIR IS FINE.
ATER IS FINE.
SOIL IS FINE.
AREN'T WE JUST FINE?
PSSSST!
HEY, YOU!
DO YOU KNOW WHERE THIS "EXPERT" GROUP ON THE "MYTH OF CLIMATE CHANGE" CAME FROM?
ROCKET MEN.
THE FOUNDERS OF THE MARSHALL "INSTITUTE" WERE COLD WAR ERA PHYSICISTS... WHO HELPED BUILD ROCKETS, MISSILES, WEAPONS THAT SCARED THE ENTIRE WORLD!
They'd worked on the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb and rocketry and other nuclear weapons delivery systems.
Robert Jastrow was an astrophysicist who was the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, very active in the American space program, active in the Apollo program and other rocketry programs.
William Nierenberg was a nuclear physicist who had begun his career on the MANHATTAN PROJECT, working on isotope separation and the was a long-time director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography where he supervised and sponsored many Navy oceanographic research projects associated with submarine detection, acoustic detection of Soviet submarines and the accurate guidance of submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Fred Seitz was a solid state physicist who had worked with Eugene Wigner, one of the fathers of the ATOMIC BOMB, and at one time the president of the US National Academy of Sciences.
MANHATTAN PROJECT?
ATOMIC BOMBS?
GUIDED MISSILES?
NO WORRIES OVER GLOBAL WARMING, EH?
THOSE GUYS DIDN'T WORRY WHEN THE WORLD WAS ON THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION!
THEY LIKED IT!
THEY HELPED MAKE IT SO!
NICE PAYCHECKS, STELLAR CAREERS!
SO, TRUST GUYS LIKE THAT ON THE CLIMATE?
SURE, SURE, WHY NOT, RIGHT?
RIGHT?
NO!
NO, WE SHOULD NOT TRUST THEM BECAUSE THEY FOOLED US ALL BEFORE!
THEY DUPED US ALL PREVIOUSLY, THIS "MARSHALL INSTITUTE" GANG!
These men had known each other throughout their career.
Both Seitz and Nierenberg had served as science advisor to NATO.
They had been on various advisory committees together.
In the 1980s, they found themselves working together on an advisory panel to the Reagan administration on the question of strategic defence, or what most of us know of as Star Wars, the idea of a missile shield to protect the United States from incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In 1984 they created the Marshall Institute TO DEFEND REAGAN'S STRATEGIC DEFENSE against a boycott of it by US scientists.
AGAINST 6,500 U.S. SCIENTISTS WHO SAW "STAR WARS" AS A FIRST-STRIKE SCENARIO!
Strategic defence was highly controversial, both in the United States and elsewhere, because it was a departure from the long established Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
It seemed impossible to build a perfect impermeable missile shield, not technologically feasible. But even if it were, in a way that would be worse, because it would be politically destabilizing!
After all, if you thought you had an effective missile shield, then you might be tempted to launch a FIRST STRIKE, thinking that you would be immune to retaliation.
Well, for this reason, many scientists who had worked quite happily on weapon systems during the '60s, '70s and '80s, refused to work on strategic defence.
6,500 American scientists and engineers signed a petition declaring a boycott of strategic defence program funds.
6,500!
This was unprecedented in the history of the Cold War.
During the Cold War there had been numerous individual scientists who sometimes for personal reasons declined to work on particular weapon systems, but there had never been a wholesale rejection of a nuclear weapons program by OVER 6,000 American scientists.
This greatly disturbed the Reagan administration and it greatly disturbed Seitz, Nierenberg and Jastrow, who supported SDI and who argued against the majority of their technical colleagues that SDI was feasible, that it could be made to work, and moreover that it was necessary and even urgent.
DID THEIR MINDS CHANT, "FIRST STRIKE, FIRST STRIKE!"
Between 1984 and 1989, Jastrow, Seitz and Nierenberg worked to defend SDI by promoting an alarming view of Soviet strength and a very frightening picture of American military weakness.
"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!"
They wrote numerous articles, opinion pieces, white papers, ALL defending SDI and claiming that the Soviet Union was overtaking the United States in military and technical superiority.
The National Review article, 'American has five years left!', was a real piece of work, something you should look at to see HOW these guys PUT A SPIN on things to get the public to SWALLOW THE BITTER PILLS!
Skeptics like to claim that climate scientists are alarmists, but you see that actually that shoe is on the other foot.
The MARSHALL guys are EXPERTS on creating "FALSE ALARMS"!
America did not have five years left, it was actually the Soviet Union that had less than five years left.
After the Berlin Wall fell, Russia dissolved!
SAME GUYS NOW TELL US NOT TO BELIEVE SCIENCE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING, THEN WE SEE COASTAL CITIES FLOODING, SIGNS EVERYWHERE THAT OUR ENVIRONMENT AND WE, YES, WE ARE FAILING IN HEALTH AS WELL....
THE MARSHALL BOYS ARE SPIN DOCTORS AND THEY HAVE SPUN A WEB OF DECEIT THAT IS KILLING US!
WE ARE LITERALLY DYING TO DENY GLOBAL WARMING!
PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THIS NEXT PART!
THIS IS WHERE THE STORY OF THE "ILLUSTRIOUS" MARSHALL INSTITUTE PEOPLE GETS EVEN MORE INTERESTING!
Frederick Seitz, who was the founding chairman of the board of the Marshall Institute, was a nuclear physicist.
BUT THERE'S MORE! THERE IS WORSE!
In 1979, he took a new job in his retirement.
He had retired from his work as a physicist and went to work for...
THE R.J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO CORPORATION!
He took a position with R. J. Reynolds as a consultant, directing a biomedical research program in which he distributed over $45 million to scientists doing research that could IN ANY WAY cast doubt on the science that established the harms of tobacco.
HE WAS PAID TO FIND WAYS TO FOOL AMERICANS, AND AGREED TO HELP FORMULATE THE LIES AND FALSIFY RESEARCH THAT SMOKING WAS NOT DEADLY!
SMOKING WAS JUST FINE!
JUST FINE...LIKE GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT A PROBLEM, IS JUST FINE?
We know from the research of other scholars that one of the principal strategies of the tobacco industry, to defend tobacco against the scientific evidence of its harms, was doubt-mongering, to insist that the science was unsettled, that we didn't really know for sure if tobacco was really dangerous, that we couldn't explain all the mechanisms, that there were a lot of uncertainties.
"PSSST! How come two sisters could both smoke a pack a day, one gets cancer, the other doesn't?"
SEE HOW IT WORKS?
Therefore, because of these uncertainties, "it would be premature for the government to intervene to regulate tobacco use."
IF THIS DOES NOT RING A BELL FOR YOU, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE SAME THING IS BEING DONE BY THE MARSHALL GROUP TODAY THAT WAS DONE FOR THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY, YOU MUST BE A NEW KIND OF DEEP STUPID...SORRY FOR YOU!
THEY'RE EVEN USING THE EXACT SAME PHRASES!
In 1989 these two stories merged.
The Cold War ended and the Soviet enemy began to disintegrate.
The west had won the Cold War, and you might have thought that these old Cold War Warriors would be happy, that they would be satisfied that their life's work had come to such a positive fruition.
They might have rested content, but they didn't.
It's kind of like old generals who can't stop fighting the last war.
What we see is that they find a new enemy.
This new enemy is what they called ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISM, what they considered to be, OR WERE PAID WELL TO CONSIDER TO BE, an exaggeration of environmental threats by people with an alleged LEFT-WING AGENDA.
OH, NO! NOT A LEFT-WING AGENDA IN A RIGHT-WING STRUGGLING ECONOMY!
ANYTHING BUT THAT!
IF AMERICANS START SCREAMING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANUP, FOR NEW LAWS TO PROTECT THEM AND THE ENTIRE EARTH FROM THE RUIN CAUSED BY INDUSTRY, PROFITS WOULD DROP!
THE ECONOMY WOULD SUFFER IF BIG BUSINESS HAD TO USE ANY OF THEIR PROFITS TO CREATE BETTER AIR QUALITY, TO INSURE NON-TOXIC WATER AND SOIL!
NOOOOO!
THAT WON'T DO!
MUST SAVE THE MERCHANTS OF WALL STREET!
DAMN THE LOWLY MASSES!
THIS MEANS WAR!
AND WAR IT IS!
THE NEW ENEMY ARE THOSE DAMNED ENVIRONMENTALISTS.
BUT THE MARSHALL GROUP AND THOSE WHO URGED THEM ON HAD LEARNED USEFUL LESSONS FROM THAT TOBACCO WAR.
The lessons that Frederick Seitz had learned working for the tobacco industry, the old tobacco strategy - DOUBT-MONGERING was liberally applied to the new issue of climate change.
They began to insist that the science is unsettled, that we don't really know and that there isn't a consensus among the scientific experts.
SAME EXACT THINGS THAT THEY USED TO TRY TO SAVE THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY!
'Doubt is our product' ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive in 1969, 'since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the minds of the general public.'
Now this is an incredibly important memo.
It's been reproduced by many scholars in many different contexts, and it was a crucial piece of evidence in the US federal prosecution of the tobacco industry, because it showed that the tobacco industry giants deliberately worked together, conspired to lie about the carcinogenic effects of nicotine and tars.
The tobacco industry was found guilty of conspiracy under the Racketeering and Corrupt Organisations Act, because of documents like this that showed that the tobacco industry consciously set out to challenge the scientific evidence by manufacturing doubt.
THEY MANUFACTURED DOUBT...NOT VIABLE PROOF, JUST DOUBT!
One of the key insights the tobacco industry realized early on was that for this doubt-mongering campaign to be credible, for it to be effective for journalists who'd quote them, it wouldn't do for tobacco industry executives to get up and say, we don't really know if tobacco is harmful.
Most of us would realize that that didn't pass the laugh test.
But if the tobacco industry could get SCIENTISTS to say it, and particularly if they could get distinguished scientists, prestigious scientists, a president of the US National Academy of Sciences to say it, well that would have a lot of credibility.
In particular, the documents show that the tobacco industry understood that it would have credibility with the media, and that THE MEDIA might not quote a tobacco industry executive, but they would quote the president of the US National Academy of Sciences.
So a key component of this strategy was the recruitment of scientists, was finding scientists who would be willing to participate in this activity.
AGAIN, MONEY TALKS, AND AGAIN, MEN WHO SEE HONOR AS A MARKETABLE COMMODITY SOLD THEIRS TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER!
The "tobacco strategy" is spread to a whole set of other environmental issues, and now we see scientists supplying NEW doubt, exaggerating doubt, emphasising doubt, amplifying doubt, about the reality of acid rain, the severity of the ozone hole and of course the human causes of global warming.
CREATION OF DOUBT IS A BOOMING INDUSTRY!
THE MARSHALL INSTITUTE IS CASHING IN!
KA-CHING-KA-CHING!
There's even a rear guard action in recent years to revisit the scientific evidence of the harms of DDT and to claim that DDT should never have been banned in the first place.
DDT IS GOOD FOR AMERICANS!
SURELY SOME "CREDIBLE SCIENTISTS" CAN BE PAID TO SAY SO?
SURELY.
AND JUST AS SURELY, MANY WHO HATE THOSE "DAMNED TREE-HUGGING HIPPIES", THOSE DAMNED ENVIRONMENTALISTS, THOSE DAMNED ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUPS, THOSE DAMNED "SAVE THE PLANET" WEIRDOS, THOSE POOR UNFORTUNATES SUING THEIR ASSES OFF FOR ILLNESSES AND DEATHS CAUSED BY TOXIC ENVIRONMENTS, THOSE WHO HATE ALL WHO WANT A CLEAN AIR WORLD, WILL BUY THE GARBAGE SPOON-FED THEM BY A GLOBAL ELITE WHO WOULDN'T PISS ON THE LOWLY MASSES IF THEY WERE ON FIRE.
AMERICANS LOVE TO HATE.
AMERICANS LOVE WAR.
AMERICANS, "SUPER-PATRIOTS", WILL MAKE DAMN SURE WE DON'T HAVE CURSED ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS!
THEY WILL BUY WHAT INDUSTRY IS SELLING....ALL THE WAY TO THEIR GRAVES!
In every one of these cases, we see this small group of MARSHALL INSTITUTE physicists denying the severity of these problems.
In every single case, the SAME pattern, over and over and over again, INSISTING that the science was "too uncertain to justify government action".
It involves the systematic misrepresentation of the actual scientific evidence, just as the tobacco industry did before.
You know the old adage, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
It's like fool me 17 times, please, I'm willing!
The SAME thing over and over again.
Yet, because it's a seemingly different issue with different scientists, different journalists, people don't see the pattern.
THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO SEE THE PATTERN!
THEY WANT TO BE DUPED!
THEY WANT TO DENY THE HUGE MONSTER IN FRONT OF THEM JUST AS THEY ALWAYS HAVE!
MONSTERS ARE SCARY!
WHO CAN FACE SUCH A FEARSOME THING?
ONLY THE TRULY BRAVE, THAT'S WHO!
ONLY THE VALIANT!
ONLY THE ONES WHO HAVE A WARRIOR'S HEART!
Why would distinguished scientists misrepresent scientific evidence?
Why would distinguished scientists like a president of the US National Academy of Sciences attack his own scientific colleagues, misrepresent their work, launch personal attacks on them, accuse them of fraud?
Why would a scientist do that to his fellow scientists?
IT ISN'T ALWAYS ABOUT MONEY, BELIEVE IT OR NOT.
What we really see is that it's often IDEOLOGICAL and that it's driven by the ideology that George Soros has given the title 'free market fundamentalism'.
Free market fundamentalism is really a kind of end member of a wide spectrum of beliefs that can be broadly categorized as modern neoliberalism.
This is a set of beliefs that are focused on the value of deregulation and releasing the so-called magic of the marketplace.
It came to prominence in the early 1980s, and this is not a coincidence, so one of the interesting things about this story is that the scientific evidence of global warming is coalescing just as a political consensus is moving towards deregulation.
This is a historical contingency that has very, very great political and social consequences.
It came to prominence in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Ronald Reagan in the United States, but it continued through the 1990s, you saw it in Australia under the John Howard administration.
But its intellectual roots are much earlier.
They're to be found in the ideology of two key thinkers, Milton Friedman, the American economist and founder of the Chicago School of Economics, and Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist considered one of the founders of modern neoliberalism.
So what is this crucial argument of neoliberal ideology?
Milton Friedman's most important book was a work called 'Capitalism and Freedom' published in 1962, right at the coldest moment of the Cold War, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
Friedman's argument was really encapsulated by his title, and it's an argument against communism and in favour of capitalism.
His argument is that civic freedom and free markets are inextricably linked, because if a state wants to control markets through centralized planning, the only way you can control markets is to control the people who act in those markets.
Therefore it's inevitable that if you abandon free markets, you will abandon freedom more generally, and you'd be on a slippery slope to tyranny, to Soviet style communism.
Hayek was an Austrian economist who fled Austria after the Anschluss and went to the United Kingdom where he became a professor at the London School of Economics.
He believed that Austrian fascism had arisen in response to the failures of socialism, and he became a passionate opponent, not only of Soviet style communism, but of Western European social democracy as well, arguing that it would put us on the road to serfdom, that today you lose your economic freedom, tomorrow you lose your civic, political or religious freedom.
The contrarians in our story took this argument even further and argued that environmentalism was the slippery slope to socialism.
Why?
Because environmentalists almost invariably argued for regulation. Whether it was acid rain, the ozone hole or second-hand smoke, all of these things seemed to imply that the government needed to step in to do something to protect people from these harms, from the negative externalities.
They argued that it was only a small step from the regulation of acid rain or second-hand smoke towards government control of our lives more broadly.
These ideas were articulated in various places, but most clearly by a fourth scientist who joined this cause, and that was Fred Singer, the bête noire of many climate scientists, who continues today to attack climate science.
Like the others, Singer's biography was remarkably close to the other three. He was also a Cold War physicist, in fact he was the proverbial rocket scientist.
He had worked on the early satellite rocketry programs in the 1950s and was the first director of the US National Weather Satellite Service. He often claims to be a climate scientist because of this connection to the weather service, but he was the director of the weather service not in his capacity as a climate scientist, which he was not, but as a rocket scientist who knew how to get those satellites up into space.
In the 1980s, Singer worked with the Reagan administration to cast doubt on the significance and severity of acid rain, arguing that controlling sulphur emissions was a billion dollar solution to a million dollar problem, so implying that environmentalists had exaggerated the significance of acid rain, and it wouldn't be significant enough to justify what it would cost to fix.
This is an argument we hear again today regarding global warming.
In the 1990s he teamed up with Fred Seitz and Bill Nierenberg to cast doubt on the scientific consensus of the ozone hole and the evidence of the harms of global warming.
I mentioned already that from 1979 to 1985 Fred Seitz had worked with the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and similarly in the early 1990s we see Fred Singer joining forces with the Philip Morris Tobacco Company, to defend tobacco in the form of second-hand smoke.
This defence took the form of offence. It took the form of an attack on the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 1993 Fred Singer teamed up with a lawyer named Kent Jeffreys and wrote a report called EPA and the Science of Environmental Tobacco Smoke.
This is one of the delicious ironies in the story and one of the few places that the tobacco industry made a serious tactical error.
CREATE FEAR.
CREATE A MONSTER TO MAKE THE MASSES HATE THE TRUTH.
So it's this worry, this anxiety, this fear, that leads to the suspicion, even the allegation, that environmentalists are really socialists in disguise.
George Will, the columnist for The Washington Post, has accused environmentalism of being a dream tree with red ( i.e. COMMUNIST) roots.
The US senator, James Inhofe, a senator from Oklahoma, has threatened to indict climate scientists for conspiracy to lie to congress, and accused them of being part of a conspiracy to bring down global capitalism.
"TO BRING DOWN GLOBAL CAPITALISM."
THERE IT IS!
THERE IS WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!
Let's go back for a moment to Fred Singer and Kent Jeffreys' 1993 report, and notice that it's published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute.
So who are the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute?
Well, they're a think tank whose goal is 'the extension and perfection of democracy and economic liberty and political freedom'. So here we have again this assertion or assumption that economic liberty and political liberty go hand in hand.
In practice though, if we ask how does the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute try to promote liberty, the answer is through lower taxation and less regulation OF INDUSTRY.
Who was Kent Jeffreys, this co-author?
It turns out he was a lawyer affiliated with the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
What is the Cato Institute?
A think tank dedicated to individual liberty, limited government and free markets.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute?
A group dedicated to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity and strengthening free markets.
Free markets, free markets, free markets.
FREE FOR WHOM?
So it begins with the Marshall Institute and this rather small group of people, but then it begins to spread very, very widely.
The list of different think tanks and institutes, I've counted at least 20 or 30, ALL banding together for a common cause...
SAVE THE INDUSTRIALISTS, SAVE THE FREE MARKET!
Some of the most important ones to join this battle are the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Acton Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the list goes on and on and on.
FREE MARKETS, NO REGULATIONS, SAVE INDUSTRY!
So all of these groups SAY they promote freedom, all of these groups SAY they promote liberty.
Who could disagree with that?
But if we ask the question who funds these groups and who do they really represent, then what we find is that they're funded by regulated industries, regulated industries that produce products that have serious negative consequences that are not addressed by the free market, what economists call the negative externalities, the consequences that are not reflected in the market price.
So we have at the very beginning of this story the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry, the mining industry, the chemical industry FUNDING ALL THESE SO-CALLED THINK-TANKS.
In addition, we see funding for these think tanks coming from libertarian foundations.
Most of these (with the exception of Coors who made his money on beer), if you ask them where did the money from these foundations come from originally, all of them have roots in the fossil fuel industry.
THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY.
BIG OIL, COAL, LOGGING INDUSTRIES, ALL NEED TO DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT FOR PROFIT....ALL.
THEY WILL NOT OPERATE PROFITABLY ENOUGH TO SUIT THEM IF THEY HAVE TO CLEAN UP AFTER THEMSELVES AS THEY GO!
Of course, there's a profound irony at the heart of this story, because while we have delayed acting on global warming, the problem has gotten steadily worse.
Many scientists now think we are reaching, or perhaps have even passed crucial tipping points that could lead to true crises like the breakup of West Antarctica that would lead to FEET rather than inches of sea level rise.
The longer we wait, the more we increase the likelihood that we WILL need intrusive government action to prevent such catastrophes.
Ironically, by fostering delay, the merchants of doubt have made it more likely that the very thing they most dreaded will actually occur.
THEY COULD VOLUNTARILY CLEAN UP THEIR ACTS, BUT WON'T!
I would submit that no one is an advocate of intrusive government, BUT, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out, liberty for wolves does mean death to sheep.
ALL societies accept some limitations on the actions of others, because without such limits there would be no civil society
We DO regulate behavior and we do it to protect people from negative externalities, from unintended consequences, from unacceptable costs to INNOCENT bystanders.
We create those limits based on our judgement of the potential harms and risks, based on our judgement of what those negative externalities are.
This is why it is so important for us to understand the science, because it's the science that tells us what is happening and what is likely to happen if we don't do something to control greenhouse gases.
It is the science that explains the risks and the harms that we face.
It's for that reason that it is the science that has come under such virulent attack.
In 1990 Richard Darman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George H. W. Bush, dismissed the concerns of environmentalists derisively, saying Americans did not fight and win the wars of the 20th century to make the world safe for green vegetables.
THAT MORON DIDN'T KNOW, OR ELSE IS TOO DUMB TO CARE, THAT AS THE GREEN THINGS GO, SO GO WE ALL!
We didn't make the world safe for green vegetables, nor for polar bears, nor for Pacific Islanders, and if we don't do something pretty soon, it may not be safe EVER AGAIN for OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN either.
THEY DESERVE A FIGHTING CHANCE!
MINERS USED TO TAKE SMALL BIRDS OR SMALL MAMMALS INTO THE MINES AND IF THOSE CREATURES BEGAN ACTING SICK OR FELL DEAD, THE MINERS RAN OUT TO SAVE THEMSELVES.
THEY KNEW THAT THE "LESSER ANIMALS" ARE FAR MORE SENSITIVE TO THE TOXINS IN AIR THAN HUMANS ARE.
LOOK AT THE OCEAN AND SEE THE BILLIONS OF MARINE LIFE OVER THE PAST 3 OR 4 YEARS THAT HAVE DIED, WASHED ASHORE DEAD.
LOOK AT THE SKIES, FROM WHICH MILLIONS OF BIRDS OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS HAVE STARTED FALLING DEAD .
STARLINGS TO SWANS, DROPPING DEAD.
LOOK AT OUR RIVERS. EVERYTHING, FROM DUCKS TO FROGS, IS DYING THERE AS WELL.
BUTTERFLIES, PLANTS DYING IN UNPRECEDENTED NUMBERS...AS ARE HUMANS.
AS GO THE "LESSER LIFE FORMS", SO GO WE ALL.
THOSE OLD MINERS 200 TO 2000 YEARS AGO KNEW THAT!
WE LEARN...OR WE PERISH.
OUR CHOICE.
BELIEVE THE LIES...YOU DIE.
KNOWLEDGE EMPOWERS US TO SURVIVE!
WHAT WE KNOW CAN SAVE US.
WHAT WE REFUSE TO SEE CAN DESTROY US.
(Copy Ur text B4 Preview, it don't save)
ReplyDeleteScusa, WHAT, Yif? I had several others look at this blog & it SEEMS to be OK. Tell me what you mean, please? Is it scrambled? What?
ReplyDeleteThanx.
I typed in a comment then previewed it befor posting which wiped my comment and I hadn't backed it up !
DeleteOh, OK, thanks for that, Yif.
DeleteTry it again, and if it's not SPAM, I'll OK it. I moderate everything because I learned early on that a LOT, I mean a LOT of people will drop links to porn pages, stuff they have for sale, etc.
NOPE that is NEVER gonna be allowed HERE...NO WAY.
I have & will continue to have some pretty irate comments that 100% DISAGREE with MY viewpoint, so first, be sure you can back up comments with PROOF, folks, & 2nd no "F-Bombs" & NO HYPERLINKS to anything FOR SALE.